


Behind the Tapestry

by aurilly



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Captain America: The First Avenger, Espionage, Flashbacks, Getting Back Together, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-03 18:12:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12753537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Steve takes the opportunity of the Convergence's one year anniversary to hop over to Central Europe, where he and Bucky partnered on a mission during the war.





	Behind the Tapestry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [A_Diamond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/gifts).



Steve didn’t know what he was doing here, what any of them were doing here. Thor had this, had owned this, had told the press and the governments over and over again that it had nothing to do with the Avengers. These aliens hadn’t wanted to destroy or conquer Earth in particular, he’d explained, sort of, confusingly, using endlessly long words and fairy-tale concepts no one comprehended; they’d only wanted to retrieve the thing possessing Dr Foster, in order to, obviously, end all life in the universe.

Steve didn’t feel right, standing here, taking even part of the credit for a victory he hadn’t earned, in a fight he didn’t understand. But Pepper had insisted on a group appearance, and Steve had too much of a soft spot for her to say no.

Thor finished his speech—with his own brand of inspiring flair—and hacked at the ribbon of the newly restored Greenwich library with a ceremonial broadsword someone had dug up from the archives. 

Scissors would have worked a lot better.

After a too-dainty lunch on the restored lawn, the others started to talk about firing up the quinjet and heading back to New York.

“I think I’ll stay,” Steve said, voicing a sentiment that had been growing in him all day. He wasn’t often spontaneous, not when it came to personal activities, anyway, but this felt right, in a way that the ceremony earlier had felt wrong. Perhaps he’d been contemplating it in the back of his mind for awhile, rendering the decision not spontaneous at all.

Sam cocked his head and stared right through him, assessing. “What for?”

“I need a break from New York.”

“You’ve had a break. You’ve had a break every few weeks, between taking down Hydra bases, and, you know. Hell, you’re on a break right now.”

“I mean a real one. A break that isn’t either of those things.”

“You don’t take breaks,” Sam said, understandably suspicious. “If you’re looking to take down a Hydra base by yourself… Or if there’s some new lead on…”

“No, nothing like that. No leads, of any sort. This isn’t about Hydra and it isn’t about finding Bucky. It’s just a vacation. I haven’t seen much of Europe since the war. I want to know what it looks like when it’s all put back together.” Steve lifted his hands in friendly conciliation, the trick Bucky had taught him once to get people to look away from his face as he was trying to tell a lie, in moments when he could feel his acting falter. Steve hadn’t understood at the time the significance of how and why _Bucky_ had learned such a trick, but it worked every time. “I swear. Go on, Sam. Go home. There’s got to be something you want to do that you haven’t done since taking up with all this.”

“I can think of a few things. As long as you promise this is just…”

“I promise.” Steve flexed his fingers, drawing Sam’s eyes back to his hands.

“Where are you going?”

Steve knew he’d have a tail, at least part of the way, so he kept it generally in the realm of thruth. “Clint keeps raving about Pilsner Urquell. Says there’s a good brewery tour. I’m thinking of _checking_ it out.” He paused, not sure if the joke had played. “Get it?”

Sam had to think about it for a second, but then groaned. “I definitely need a break from your corny ass. Go on.”

Steve congratulated himself on handling that with such ease.

Bucky would have been proud.

* * *

It starts with a pre-dawn pick-up. 

Steve finds Bucky already crouched outside Colonel Philipps’s office tent, sucking on the end of a cigarette, clutching his tin mug of coffee close to his chest like someone’s about to steal it, and grumbling at no one in particular. Moments like these make Steve’s lips quirk in fondness, and dispel the anxiety of everything else. In an unfamiliar world where everyone—even himself and Bucky—feel unfamiliar, there are at least a few constants. Too bad Bucky’s hideous morning mood counts among the now precious few. 

Steve doesn’t bother saying good morning; he knows better. He simply nods and stands beside him, shielding Bucky and his cigarette from the wind.

The jeep that’s supposed to pick them up arrives, thankfully, just as the coffee seems to have taken effect. Bucky’s angry mumblings have slowed down and his upper lip relaxes, signaling a reluctant return to civility. He greets the driver curtly but politely, hoists himself up into the vehicle, and reaches out a hand to help Steve, who doesn’t need it.

“You didn’t have to volunteer for this one. You didn’t have to come,” Steve whispers just after the jeep sputters and grunts into motion again, carrying them away from their unit. He says it on the knife’s edge of too late, of a chance for Bucky to change his mind. Because he isn’t sure if he actually wants Bucky to take the out he’s giving, to say, “You know what? You’re right. I didn’t have to come. See ya,” and hop out. 

Steve wants Bucky with him, always, every minute. He wants Bucky to be safe, always, every minute. He wants Bucky to be happy, he wants Bucky to, he wants Bucky…

None of these things are compatible. They haven’t been for a long time. 

Bucky huffs and does that trick he learned long ago of talking out of the side of his mouth, not quite a whisper, but soft enough that you’d really have to be listening to hear. Here, in Europe, he’d been employing the technique a lot more often than Steve remembered.

“‘Course I had to come. Who’s gonna report back to the other guys about the latest exploits of Captain Bonehead?” 

The lazy ventriloquist routine works best without eye contact, which is probably why he uses it so often these days. They know each other too well for Bucky to ever look Steve in the eye and convincingly lie. There’s something he’s been hiding all this time, something that not even Steve’s alternating techniques of haranguing, teasing, ordering, and pleading, have gotten him to spill. Steve has a feeling Bucky’s been hiding a lot of somethings, disparate in nature, yet loosely connected, which is why Steve hasn’t been able to figure them out yet. 

From the hitch in Bucky’s breath and from the way he peers between the trees along the road, there’s a strong chance that whatever Bucky’s doing here today, with Steve, on this mission, is wrapped up in the larger mystery. 

“That isn’t why you came,” Steve challenges, hoping for something more.

“No, obviously not.” This time Bucky looks straight at Steve, signaling that what’s about to come is true and easily shared. He drops his voice, for Steve’s ears but not for the driver’s. “ _You’re_ the one who didn’t have to come. I would’ve been roped into it anyway, being the only one who speaks Czech and all.”

Steve similarly drops his voice, but out of surprise, not design. “You speak Czech? Since when?” 

“Since always. I thought you knew.” The crease that’s become a permanent feature of Bucky’s forehead craters a little deeper. “How did you not know?”

“I knew you spoke German. Because of Hochner. I don’t see what that has to do with Czech.” 

Steve remembers swinging his short legs off the stool behind the counter of Mr. Hochner’s general store on Atlantic Avenue on countless afterschool afternoons all through their youth, practically a decade’s worth. Steve had kept Bucky company as he stocked shelves with the latest delivery of canned goods, updated the books, packed delivery orders, and took care of correspondence that Mr. Hochner’s English never improved enough to do. In Steve, Hochner had gotten an extra assistant bagger in exchange for candy and sodas. Bucky had started working there so young that he’d mastered the accent along with Hochner’s tongue-twister of a language, gossiping cheerily with the German customers and becoming beloved of all the neighborhood Omas.

“He was from near the border. And his wife was from the other side. I learned ‘em both. I really thought you knew.” Bucky sounds physically distressed at the thought that Steve doesn’t know this about him, distressed that any unintentional secret exists between them, even as he’s clearly been keeping a lot of intentional ones.

The distress warms Steve, who knows, deep down, despite how much more he wants, despite the hopeless anger he’s been holding in about, well, everything, that they’re still Steve and Bucky, two peas in a pod, the rugrats of Baltic Avenue. More importantly, Bucky wants them to be, just as much as Steve does.

The rub, unfortunately, is that’s _all_ Bucky wants them to be. He made it crystal, heart-shatteringly clear the day he got his draft notice. 

Steve takes a deep breath and tells himself that it’s enough. It’s got to be.

“It’s fine, Buck. It isn’t a big deal. I mean, I can see how it never came up. When either of them talked, it all sounded the same to me.” Brightly, he adds, “So, German _and_ Czech. Huh.”

“French, too,” Bucky says with a wink, in reference to Marguerite Follimaux, his main squeeze for most of high school, the bombshell from Bordeaux. “It’s all come in handy. The brass practically wet themselves when I was dumb enough to let on. Why else do you think I made Sargent so fast, before I’d ever been deployed?”

“I never thought about it, I guess,” Steve says. He always assumed that of course they’d immediately recognized Bucky’s talents—an amiable ability to diffuse a situation, an earthy resourcefulness and practicality when it came to a fight, a hyper-alertness to objects around him that Steve was starting to think was partly a Brooklyn thing, in addition to a Bucky thing.

“How else has it come in handy?” Steve asks, because something about Bucky’s tone implies that he means more instances than the couple of missions where Bucky has had to translate German signs or documents for the Commandoes. 

“You’ll find out soon enough, without me having to be the one to tell you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Classified. But don’t worry. I’m guessing, since we’re on this mission together, that it won’t be classified for long. Not from you. I’m almost glad. I’ve hated having to…”

“To what?”

“You know.”

Steve doesn’t.

They reach a better part of the road, where the bouncing and jangling of the vehicle no longer drowns out their conversation. Bucky forcibly changes the subject, and they talk about other topics, safe topics, comfortable anecdotes that provide further reassure Steve that Bucky’s still his best friend, most reliable partner, an extension of himself, even despite all the secrets between them, and the weirdness, and _that_.

It should be enough. It isn’t.

Endless pothole-induced bumps jolt them closer together, so that they rub together, all the way from their shoulders to the pockets at their hips, down strong thighs, to the toes of their boots. 

It definitely isn’t.

They remain watchful, with their hands on their guns, but don’t run into any trouble on this extended spring day. Bucky’s mentioned many a time how he likes the way the sun lingers longer in Northern Europe than back home. It’s still just about light out when the jeep pulls into a Allied base at 21:00. 

“Time to face the music,” Bucky says as they slow down.

“It’s just a mission briefing, like any other,” Steve replies, but he’s starting to think it isn’t. 

All this had been explained to him as a scouting trip, a peek at the next Hydra facility on their list to help Steve plan a successful mission. This base had proven an exceptionally difficult one to gain access to, Philipps’s intelligence said, since it was nestled deeper than usual in enemy territory. So, Steve volunteered to do the scouting work himself, not wanting to risk anyone else’s welfare in what sounded like a tricky and dangerous job. He was half-surprised to hear that Bucky would be accompanying him, too. Steve assumed Bucky had requested to be his friend’s backup, as he always was in the larger missions, but given their conversation earlier, that no longer seemed to be the case.

“We’re here to see General Morrow,” Bucky tells one of the soldiers who immediately surround them. He flashes papers Steve’s never seen before, and a soldier nods, gesturing for them to follow. 

Deeper into the camp, they’re presented to tall man—taller than Steve even—with a distinguished grey moustache and grey eyes that fail to be as icy as the rest of him projects.

“I’m assuming you’re Rogers,” he says.

Bucky presses his index finger into Steve’s shoulder, pushing his left side forward with surprising strength. Halfway between teasing and genuine, he asks, “Only assume? Come on, Morrow. Don’t you recognize Captain America’s handsome mug from the news reels?” 

“Captain Rogers at your service. The reels with my face don’t get sent around as much as the ones with the cowl,” Steve admits with a salute, and boy is he glad of that fact. 

“I haven’t seen your face before but I’ve heard all about what you and your men have done. Your methods are, let’s say, unconventional, but there’s no arguing with results.”

“You’ve heard as much as your clearance lets you, you mean,” Bucky says, and Steve wonders where he gets the nerve, because talking like this to strange generals is a line cross, even for the always-cheeky Bucky. “Trust me. The methods you haven’t heard about are that much more unconventional, and the results that much more impressive.”

“Even if I didn’t already know your face, Barnes, tales of your smart mouth have made their way up and down the goddamn front,” the General says. It’s remarkable that he lets Bucky get away with it, almost as though he belongs to a different class of soldier.

“Better than my pretty face getting around, though. That would be bad for business.” 

Morrow shakes his head, amused and almost fond. “Come on. The other spooks are already here.”

Steve’s ears prick at the word ‘other’. He’s starting to understand what Bucky meant about all his languages ‘coming in handy’.

Bucky catches the almost invisible reaction and casts a quick, apologetic glance in Steve’s direction. A confirmation. 

“Who’d they get this time? Stanley?” he asks the general, keeping up surprisingly easily with Steve’s and Morrow’s long strides.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me it isn’t Reichert.”

“I said you weren’t going to like it.”

“Great,” Bucky groans.

“Snellings, too,” Morrow adds.

“Well, there’s some good news, at least.”

Steve’s supposed to be in charge here. He’s the leader. He’s supposed to know what’s going on. He always does. But he’s at a loss here, today, on this mission. Bucky and this General he’s never met are on something approaching familiar terms, they’re talking about common acquaintances Steve’s never heard of, have a rhythm going that Steve can’t wedge himself into. He normally wouldn’t care which spy had brought the intel or who this general was. What rankles is that _Bucky_ knows and cares, and Steve had no idea.

Morrow leads them to a tent even bigger than Philips’s, and with more guards standing watch, commensurate with his higher rank. Inside the flaps is an even fancier space than Philipps’s, with coffee pots and a real desk, and huge maps neatly rolled up and standing in a corner.

Steve notices that the two men sitting in folding chairs in the corner don’t get up, don’t salute. Like kings in the presence of a king, they apparently have the right to remain seated in front of the general, with their round faces immobile and their legs leisurely extended as they read from a stack of papers that they pass between each other.

“Barnes,” one says, frowning at Bucky.

“Reichert,” Bucky says, nodding coldly back. Then, brighter, “Hey, Snellings. Been awhile.”

“Heard about that spot of trouble in Azzano a few months back,” Snellings replies, in the kind of smooth, aristocratic accent Steve has only heard in movies, and in Peggy’s mocking impersonations of her superiors back in London. More telling is the deliberate understatement of what happened. “Nasty business. Glad to see you back in one piece.”

“Mostly,” Bucky says with a shrug, and with a flash of something behind his eyes—the same something that’s been taunting Steve all these months.

“Thanks to you, yes?” Reichert asks, lowering his head and looking up at Steve over the rim of his owlish glasses. “Erskine’s petri dish godling?”

Bucky glowers, ready to spit out a ripe insult, but Steve touches his wrist to quiet him. Snellings, similarly well-versed in shutting up his partner, pinches Reichert in silent rebuke. A quick glance at Morrow reveals total confusion. Apparently, Bucky was right about his clearance level. And also about Reichert being a jerk.

“Business now, gentleman. Although,” Snellings says with a pleasantly polite grin at Morrow, and a wink at Bucky, “a spot of brandy usually helps poor Barnes here retain the details.”

Bucky snorts. “Missed you, too, Snellings.”

* * *

For irrational yet obvious reasons, Steve hadn’t taken a train since the war. But something about the Eurostar’s underwater passage reassured him, cocooned him, and by the time he emerged in France, the fear had morphed into something manageable. From then on, he decided, it would be trains all the way. He transferred in Paris to an overnighter, booked a sleeper car, and woke up in Prague, where the pastel paints of the buildings blended together even more sweetly than they had last time he was here. 

He rented a car and retraced his steps. The Google map woman’s condescending voice simply narrated the route that Steve’s enhanced memory directed. 

Endless billboards advertised unfamiliar soft drinks, the road had been widened into a proper highway, and generally, a quiet sense of earned and careful comfort permeated the landscape. The abandoned trenches had been filled in. But generally, more than enough had survived for Steve to recognize something every few minutes—the sign pointing to a town here, a still-crumbling old barn there.

Bucky would have loved the oversized drinks emporium Steve stopped at to stock up on water, and to try one of the drinks he kept seeing advertised. His dream if he ever made it home, he’d confessed to Steve, just a few miles farther down this very road, was to open a getränkemarkt. Bucky had always been endlessly thirsty. He’d loved being around all those bottles: brown and green, or clear; tall, short or round; beer, wine, or water; all organized just so in their wooden crates. 

“Hochner would help me get it started,” he’d said.

“Hochner wouldn’t want the competition,” Steve had replied.

“He’d take it if it was from me. He loved me like the son he never had.” What Bucky hadn’t said was the other truth, which was that over the years he’d turned down offers for better afterschool jobs because he’d loved Hochner like the father he missed, the father his step-dad had never managed to become. No wonder he’d mastered a language that had increasingly become a signal of suspicion, in addition to one too obscure for anyone to associate with much. 

The roads had improved since the war, cutting down the drive time significantly. Having undertaken this trip as a sort of masochistic penance, a diuretic, Steve had expected to feel sick as he approached his destination. Instead, he felt lighter with each passing mile. A strange feeling started in his toes and worked its way up his legs to suffuse his whole self. It took him a few more miles to realize what it was: comfort. 

He’d finally found it, _here_ , of all places, long after Steve had given up looking for such a concept. An unexpected slice of home in the middle of a never-ending war.

Bucky would have understood. Bucky had felt similarly about this place. 

Maybe that was why Steve did now.

* * *

No. It doesn’t start with a pre-dawn pickup. In fact, it starts before. 

The first time Bucky does the eye-contact-avoiding ventriloquist thing is on the walk back from Azzano. 

“You need a break?” Steve whispers after eight hours of marching, eight hours of watching Bucky move like something’s _wrong_ , like he isn’t comfortable in his skin, like the opposite of Bucky Barnes.

Bucky glances behind him. “A few of the stragglers at the back could probably use the rest.”

“I wasn’t asking about them.”

“Well, you should.”

“They’ve all had it rough, all the men, but you—”

Bucky looks away, at the fork in the road they aren’t taking. “Quit worrying, Steve.”

It isn’t a lie, but neither is it an answer. Steve can wait until they’re alone for more. The only problem is that as soon as they make it back to the base, Bucky hip-hips an arrival cheer for Steve and then disappears. 

“Medical bay, over in the village,” Philipps’s aide tells Steve on the first evening, when he’s wandering around like an overgrown dog looking for his lost bone. “No visitors.” 

“He seemed all right on the walk back. He told me he was all right,” Steve argues, even though a niggling part of him has been screaming the contrary the whole time. 

“They took him to the medical bay,” the man says, leaving off the ‘sir’, because not everyone has heard about Steve’s promotion. “That’s all I know.”

‘No visitors’ never stopped Bucky from sneaking into Steve’s hospital room when he was sick, and it sure as hell isn’t going to stop Steve from returning the favor. He strikes out alone in the direction of the village, finds the makeshift hospital, and climbs in through a grenade-widened window.

He scans all the bays where burned men, post-amputation men, men with gangrene, all lay in dirty cots. Bucky isn’t among them, of course he isn’t, because he’s _fine_ , Steve tries to convince himself. He eventually finds Bucky at the far end of the hospital, in a room all by himself.

He looks like hell. Pasty and blotchy and sweaty, and his always pale eyes almost glowing. If Steve’s honest with himself, Bucky looked like this the whole walk back from Austria, but the dirt and grime and soot from their escape had largely covered it up. Now that he’s bathed, there’s no ignoring it. 

However, it means nothing, has to mean nothing, because, far from the bedridden tragedy Steve has feared, Bucky is doing pull-ups from a ceiling beam. _Pull-ups_ , in a goddamn medical facility where guys in the next room are not so quietly dying.

Bucky drops to his feet and places his arms akimbo as soon as he spots Steve.

“Steve,” he says, in the same awed and happy and confused tone that broke Steve’s heart back in that laboratory. Then something frightened—more fear, even, than had been in evidence that day—creeps into his face. “You shouldn’t be here.” 

“They told me you were sick. They told me no visitors. I thought you were _dying_. I had to see you.”

“Peggy’s right. You _are_ dramatic.”

Steve spins around to see Howard leaning against a wooden beam, radiating his usual mischievous cheer, as though nothing’s wrong or weird here. Maybe, to Howard, nothing ever is.

“You aren’t a doctor,” Steve says. “How come you’re allowed here?”

“Maybe I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The man who got you to jump out of a plane and into enemy territory.” It would be believable, too, if not for the clipboard and pen in Howard’s hands.

“Howard,” Bucky warns, and maybe he’s blushing, or maybe he’s gone paler. It’s hard to tell when he’s this blotchy. “Howard here’s playing at doctor today. He claims the cases where nothing’s wrong and says he fixed them.”

“So you’re fine?” Steve asks.

“Seems so. They just have me doing some conditioning exercises to make sure. I’ll be up and at ‘em again in no time.”

“You’re staying?” Steve had imagined having this conversation somewhere private, without an audience, but he’ll take what he can get. “They were saying you could go home, honorable discharge. You could…”

“Not without you,” Bucky says softly, an echo of a choice he’s made so many times, and which Steve is secretly, selfishly, glad he keeps making. It almost makes up for some other choices he’s made, one in particular that Steve wishes he would reverse.

“Send him home?” Howard interrupts. “Must have been talking about some other Barnes. We need him here, more than ever.”

“Howard,” Bucky says, warning again.

“More than ever? What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve asks. 

“I’m the only one who’s seen the inner workings of one of Hydra’s laboratories and lived to tell the tale. That’ll come in handy on those missions you’ll be planning, don’t you think, _Captain_?” Bucky winks, but it’s a shadow of his old rakishness.

“Yes, it will. But—”

“They’re gonna let me out of here tomorrow afternoon. I’ll come find you as soon as they do, okay? I promise.”

Howard’s presence stoppers up all the things Steve really _wants_ to say, to get off his chest, now that he’s been given this second chance. So, after a little more chit-chat and a little more worrying, and a lot more bullshit from the fearsome combination of Howard and Bucky, Steve hugs Bucky, a little too tight, counterbalances the embrace with a noogie now that he’s tall enough to give one, and heads back to his lonely officer’s tent.

Bucky’s never broken a promise to Steve, which is why Steve doesn’t have to wait long before Bucky shows up at the bar the next evening in full uniform. He’s still pale, but it’s a good look on him, now that the blotchiness has receded. He comes in a teasing mood, and doesn’t leave Steve’s side. He even flirts with Peggy, which is awkward, but he _sees_ Steve, which is all that matters, or should be, if Steve weren’t so selfish. He convinces himself there’s nothing more to say. He’s got Bucky back and they’re both alive and it’s more than he deserves.

It’s when a second medic is driven days later, at great risk across the length of Germany, that Steve’s internal alarms begin clanging. After some badgering in Philipps’s tent, the doctor confirms that aside from malnutrition, a little light sensitivity, and the kind of fever expected from a man kept in a damp laboratory for weeks, there’s nothing wrong with him. Steve would like nothing more to believe him, but the doctor’s report is suspiciously bland, and Philipps’s eyes glint with interest in a way Steve doesn’t like.

“What do you know?” he whispers hotly, intimidatingly as soon as Philipps steps out of his office the next morning. He’s been lying in wait since breakfast ended, since watching Bucky strut around in nothing but his undershirt. Bucky, who’s always been much more of a baby about New York’s bitter winters than sickly Steve, hogging blankets and doubling his long johns.

“It’s my job to know a lot of things. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“What’s wrong with Sargent Barnes?” Steve asks, deluding himself that by using formal titles, he can feign an impersonal interest, pretend that this personal interest hasn’t already led him to defy every protocol in the US Army.

“You heard the doctors. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“You’re lying. You’re all lying.”

“You’re such pals. Why don’t you ask him yourself? Ask him if the doctors were wrong.”

The problem is that Bucky counts among that ‘all’ Steve accuses of lying. Or, well, he would, if Steve would ask. Which is why he hasn’t. Bucky’s always emitted a kind of radio signal when he has a secret, and he’s the most loyal secret-keeper Steve has ever known. Until now, Steve’s always seen it as a positive quality.

Steve knows that if he asks, the answer will be an exasperated, “You’re worse than my mother, Steve.” Maybe if he could get Bucky alone, properly alone, for a good long time, he could wheedle it—whatever it is—out of him. However, for all that they’ve been inseparable since Bucky was released from medical, they’re almost never alone. Not properly. The army has a way of preventing that.

Except… From the sad, desperate way that Sargent Redman keeps watching Bucky and trying to catch him in corners, and from the way Bucky studiously and keeps to the middle of rooms, Steve’s got an inkling that at some point Bucky must have figured out ways of being alone, even in the army. 

Steve doesn’t mention it, and Bucky sure as hell doesn’t either. Steve doesn’t mention how Sargent Redman, who’s a tall, popular drink of good-looking blond with stormy blue eyes and a charming Southern drawl, takes to glaring daggers at Steve. He doesn’t mention how within a few weeks Redman starts glaring daggers at Howard, too. Hell, it’s all Steve can do not to glare himself, not when Howard becomes the only guy other than Steve with whom Bucky frequently goes off into corners, disappears with in ways Steve hasn’t managed.

Steve doesn’t want to hear the truth and he doesn’t want Bucky to lie, so he doesn’t ask. Howard, for all his… Howard-ness… is a good man, a solid friend. Steve overhears him promising to hook Bucky up with some Hollywood types when they get back home, just as Bucky and Steve used to dream about. Howard can make Bucky’s movie star dreams happen in a way that Steve never could. He tries to be happy for him.

“Face like that, moves like that, talent like that… You’ll be the next Errol Flynn,” Steve overhears Howard say one day, when they reemerge in the canteen line from wherever they’ve been since yesterday. “I’ll buy a whole studio if I have to, to make it happen.”

“You’re assuming I’m ever getting home.” Bucky’s laugh is mirthless, and makes Steve want to punch the wall beside which h’s lurking, pretending to listen to the British soldiers sitting with him. 

“The war’s slowing down. It’s only a matter of weeks now, months at most. You know that, more than most,” Howard replies.

“Hydra isn’t the Nazis. We’re fighting a battle that’s longer than the war. This is a battle that’s gonna bleed into the next war. Trust me. All the acting I’m ever gonna do, I have a feeling I’ll be doing it here. Steve though… If Steve ever gets home, I want you to hook him up with one of those set design jobs, okay? Promise me.”

“Whatever you want, Sarge.”

It eats Steve up inside. But he wants Bucky to be happy, so he holds his tongue. The biggest problem, Steve tries to convince himself, is that Bucky isn’t. No one’s happy. They’re in the middle of a goddamn war. But if Howard’s what Bucky wants these days, if Howard can give him a little bit of comfort, Steve isn’t going to make a fuss. 

All of this is why Steve doesn’t ask even when Bucky disappears for longer than a dinner or a breakfast. When he disappears for a day or two, off with Howard in his plane or experimental jeep or whatever the hell. Howard’s here as a civilian, not a soldier. He doesn’t have to salute. He does whatever he wants, which includes, apparently, taking his… friend… off on jaunts.

If Philipps doesn’t care, neither does Steve. 

(Bucky isn’t the only one who’s lying.)

* * *

After a few hours of pleasant driving, Steve passed the sign for Brtnický Hrádek. He gulped and took a deep breath. It was only the road sign, but seeing it hurt more than he’d expected, in that contradictory pleasure-pain way. Like rubbing a missing tooth. Or stretching a little too hard. Or getting fucked. 

It had been a long time since he’s done any of those things, since he’d felt that sensation.

He’d be back, if he could stand it (he’d make himself stand it) but he had a stop to make first.

A few kilometers later, he paused the checkpoint at the bottom the hill and announced that he’d come for lunch. The elderly guard—such a welcome difference in personnel since the last time Steve had been here—lifted the barrier bar and waved him through.

They’d turned the castle into a relaxation retreat, of all things, offering the latest in yoga and meditation and seaweed wraps, whatever the hell that was. A place to ‘find yourself’ the website promised. The last time he’d been here, Steve hadn’t done a lot of finding. There had been nothing here to find. It would have been a bust, if not for Bucky’s too-sharp ears. 

The place had been bought by an international chain a few years back, and had undergone a redesign three years ago, but the bones of the place hadn’t changed. The same faded tapestry still graced the grey walls. Steve imagined that they’d left it there, since nothing else could possibly cover a space that long. 

He didn’t think it was a Hydra base. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Sam that this wasn’t about Hydra. Too many articles in too many hoity-toity-seeming blogs and magazines were promoting the place for it to be more than what it seemed. It hadn’t shown up in any of the files Natasha had leaked. 

And anyway, Hydra would never have run a resort this surprisingly affordable. The snooty bastards would have charged sky-high rates to keep the riff-raff out. 

The staff pretended not to recognize him when he walked up to the concierge desk, but Steve had become all too familiar with this kind of repressed gushing.

“If you can keep it quiet and give me as peaceful a lunch the reviews promise,” he whispered to the nervous girl behind the front desk, “I’ll give this place the plug of a lifetime. I’ll get Stark Industries to throw a party here. But only if you keep it quiet while I’m here, and for the next few days.” 

The manager repeated his assurances, and gave what sounded like stern orders to his giggling staff. Steve still couldn’t understand what he was saying (he’d mastered French by now, and quite a bit of German, but not Czech, because who the hell spoke Czech?), but the meaning was clear enough. 

Five minutes later, while contemplating the vegetarian lasagna versus the chicken, Steve wondered if he’d come across too heavy-handed. He wished, for the millionth time, that Bucky were here. Bucky would have handled it better. In fact, he _had_ handled it better, right here.

And that was Steve’s secret, one of the few he’d been able to keep from everyone. No one knew about this place, not even Natasha. This mission had never made it into the logs. Philipps and Morrow and Snellings and Reichert, and most of all Bucky, had made certain of that. None of Bucky’s scouting trips had ever made it into the logs. Especially when, in the end, there’d been no resulting official mission. Not here, at any rate.

* * *

These new clothes fit horribly, and not only because Snellings and Reichert were unable to procure such specific garments in Steve’s unique size. Steve’s never done anything like this before, with disguises and cover stories. Direct confrontation has always been his style, so here, he’s completely out of his depth, the private to Bucky’s more experienced captain.

Speaking of which…

“So,” Steve says, as he reluctantly admires the soft purr of their German car’s engine. He grips the wheel harder, steering himself more than the vehicle towards the conversation ahead. 

“Why do I feel like I’ve stepped into Father O’Givens’s confession booth? All right. Let me have it.”

“How long have you been a spy? And,” Steve adds, using a few dropped remarks during the meeting to triangulate another hypothesis, “a sniper?”

“Since I first got here.” Bucky shifts uncomfortably in his seat, his long legs—have they always been that long?—bending like a spider’s to fit. “I wanted to tell you, Steve. But they made me sign papers, so many papers. I wanted to tell you every day.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“What?”

“You could have told me with a look, with a crook of your finger. I would have picked up any signal you wanted to give. And I wouldn’t have let on. But you didn’t. What happened to ‘us above all those other assholes’?” Steve asks, invoking their childhood motto, the one Bucky came up with back when swearing still felt dangerous and exciting, because he’d found the Musketeers’ one overused and inappropriate for a mere twosome.

“I didn’t think you’d like it,” Bucky eventually mumbles, fiddling nervously with the window handle.

“What do you mean?”

“You had all these ideas, about what the war was like, about what fighting for the right side was all about. I was on the right side, but right away they had me doing all the wrong things, or, well, things like this. Things I didn’t think you’d like. Underhanded, I guess. More underhanded than you usually go for. I didn’t want the army to let you down. _I_ didn’t want to let you down.”

“You never could, Bucky.” Steve’s about to invoke a real example. He’s about to bring up how he didn’t hate Bucky even after breaking his heart. He’s about to talk about the thing they never, ever, talk about—a topic more off-limits, and almost as illegal, as Bucky’s spy-work—but which is always buzzing in the back of Steve’s mind, and burning low in his stomach.

Maybe he’s trying to avoid, or maybe he really is this single-mindedly cut up about the whole spy thing, but Bucky deflects by croaking out a desperate, “I’ve done a lot of shit, Steve.”

Steve’s heart breaks all over again, but this time for Bucky instead of himself.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.

“Not really. Maybe some other time. But not because I want to keep it a secret. Just because… It wouldn’t help.”

Steve believes him; venting has never been therapeutic for either of them. “Whenever you want. But don’t beat yourself up about it. Orders are orders,” Steve says. “And you’ve been on the good side.”

“I guess,” Bucky says.

Steve can hear the uncertainty in Bucky’s voice, so he tries harder. “Did the orders come from men you respected?”

“Mostly.”

“Did you think the outcome was good for the war effort?”

“Usually.”

“What about the unusually, or the other side of mostly?”

“The unusually were the times Reichert was running the show. Things got messier than I like. The ‘not mostlies’ were the brass who didn’t care how messy they got. The ‘mostlies’ are guys like Philipps and Morrow, who started to make sure I was the one in charge.”

“Does Howard know?” Steve asks, thinking of the Hollywood comments, about Bucky’s acting. Only now do they make sense.

“Howard? What about him?” Bucky asks, confused, guilty, but about something else, Steve can tell, something different. 

Just as he thought.

“Does he know?” Steve repeats.

Bucky whispers, “Yeah.”

Steve steps on the gas, the only outlet for his frustration. “I’m glad there’s been someone you could talk to.”

Bucky stares at him. “What are you…”

“Does Sargent Redman know?”

Bucky goes from staring to wide-eyed panic. “No. No, he doesn’t… How…” He takes a deep breath. “Shit.”

“I’m not blind,” Steve chokes out, wishing it were summer so the landscape would be less bleak, so he could have something nice to look at, instead of reinforcing his current mood. 

“I kind of miss the days when you half were. You could barely see the movie screen. Now you’ve got fucking night vision. You see things that aren’t even there, not really. Steve…”

“It’s fine,” Steve lies.

“Since we’re doing this… There’s more.” 

“I don’t want to know,” Steve says, feeling sick. He can stomach any grisly story of espionage and assassination that Bucky might want to tell, but he doesn’t think he can keep down the lunch Morrow gave him if he has to hear about other guys Bucky’s been with. And it was a _nice_ lunch, too, bountiful and delicious, with sausages and everything.

“Steve, I just…”

“Please, Bucky. Don’t.”

Needing to change the subject, he pulls the map Snellings gave him out of his jacket pocket, along with his compass, and hands them both to Bucky. 

“Check we’re on the right track, will you?” he asks, tries to order, but it comes out strangled and strange.

Bucky takes an object in each hand and stares down at them. Sounding sadder than Steve feels—even though _he’s_ the one breaking Steve’s heart here—he says, “Sure thing, Cap.”

Steve wishes the Allies hadn’t recently blown up the region’s radio tower. He could use some tunes right now.

As they get closer to their destination, Bucky eventually fills the silence by rehearsing, and re-rehearsing, their cover stories. He thinks of every possible situation and suggests a reaction. He’s really good at this, Steve sees, bringing the same sense of focused calculation and inventive resourcefulness he’s brought to all the missions Steve has actually led. 

Bucky’s always been the only one who could jolly Steve out of a funk, and he manages it even now, when he himself is the cause, when he’s the one who’s broken Steve’s heart, when Steve wants nothing more than to burnish his anger like a sword.

A few hours later, they’re even laughing, as Bucky asks Steve to start coming up with his own cover details. He finds them hilariously literal and pokes bullet-holes all over them. Slowly, Bucky manages to reassure Steve all over again, despite Steve’s now fully confirmed heartache, that he does love Steve, with a unique fierceness, even if he may not want Steve like that, not anymore.

Sometimes, Steve thinks, Bucky is magic, his own brand of supersoldier, with the power to make things that aren’t okay seem fine.

* * *

Continuing a string of too-dainty lunches, Steve’s stomach rumbled even after his third helping of the unpronounceable grain forming a bed for his insufficient slices of chicken breast. Well, he told himself, that’s what he got for eating at a wellness retreat.

“Do you have any strudel? A lot of it?” he asked, in German, because the staff seemed to more fluent in it than in English, and also because it felt right, was what Bucky would have done.

The waitress came back with two slices and an extra helping of schlag. Steve wolfed them both down and asked for more potato soup as a dessert.

Because he was Captain America, because he was a celebrity, and because they had no other idea of what to do for a valuable guest who had no interest in trying out the seaweed wrap, the staff happily indulged his request for a tour of the property. It was what he’d secretly come for, anyway.

Had Captain Rogers come to see the tapestries, they asked? Art historians, apparently, were the only people who ever came by for this reason, and at least one of them must have been a Cap groupie, because they seemed to know he liked art.

Steve nodded to himself as he entered each room, and smiled to himself to see that the order of the tour hadn’t changed, even with the people running it. They’d done a nice job, he thought, of transforming the place into a Spartan resort, without losing what had once made it a good Nazi base. 

Funny how the two weren’t opposites.

He passed the little door, the outline of which had taunted him back then, and which had continued to prickle, so years later, at the back of his mind. He’d always wondered if maybe there _had_ been something back there, something they’d missed. Not that it would have mattered, because there had only been two more missions after this one.

This time, he wandered a few feet away from his guides and gave the stone a push. 

“What are you doing?” the manager asked, skittering over to him. 

“I was wondering if it was a secret passageway.”

“No, just a closet.” The manager fiddled with a latch Steve hadn’t noticed and opened the door. 

There was no secret passageway, no staircase to basement dungeons. Just a broom closet with a light that turned on as the door opened. Steve could see the back of it, no seams or anything to suggest deeper secrets.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Guess he was right.”

“Who?” the managed asked.

“The friend who, uh, told me about this place.”

* * *

“Holy shit,” Bucky breathes suddenly, distracted in the middle of correcting Steve’s pronunciation of French phrases that might come up. 

Even though Steve’s been learning (he didn’t have much else to do during the Belgian and French legs of the USO tour), his accent is laughable compared with Bucky’s Parisian perfection.

“What is it?” All Steve can see is an abandoned village and a few dried up farms to the right, identical with the many they’ve passed.

“Did you see that sign? Five kilometers to Brtnický Hrádek?”

“Is that how you say it? Wow.”

“That’s Hochner’s wife’s home town. I can’t believe we’re going here.”

“We’re not, actually. We’re going to, um, Horny.” Steve’s never going to forget _that_ name.

“Horní. Horní Beřkovice,” Bucky corrects with a laugh and some spit.

Steve wipes his face. “Watch your mouth.”

“It’s close enough, only ten kilometers from our destination. We’re stopping here on the way back, okay? Snellings said to find an inn or something anyway, instead of trying to head back tonight. I can’t come this close and not see.”

“Sure, if you want.”

They round a bend, and then there it is, Horny Castle, nestled high up on a craggy cliff above a pretty riverside town, just like Snellings said it would be. They run through their routine a few more times, until even Steve’s terrible acting and accent have been overcome by practice. 

“We should have practiced the back-up plan more than my accent,” Steve grumbles. 

“There’s too many of them for us to punch our way out. That’s why we’re doing this in the first place, to see how we can get in with more men, to see if there’s even a real base here worth trying to take. It’s gonna be fine. Trust me. I’ll do all the talking. All you have to do is stand there and be silent and handsome and Swiss. Gotta say, for all his faults, Reichert’s always been a genius for picking the perfect alias. You look the part, and then some.”

Bucky’s spent the past few months teasing Steve about his new body, worrying over him in a mothering way that he never had back when Steve had actually needed mothering, asking the oddest, most technical, most oddly on-the-nose questions about the changes to Steve’s body and then looking worried to receive the innocuous answers. Far from realizing the desperate fantasy Steve has clung to since the procedure—that he might see Bucky again, that Bucky might be wowed enough, aroused enough by Steve’s improved body to reconsider—Bucky has demonstrated a mostly clinical interest, seeming almost afraid of Steve’s body in a way no one else has. And that, surprisingly, has been good, in its own, oddly satisfying way. It’s nice to have _someone_ who looks at him with a distinct lack of awe, to have Bucky refuse to let go of a Steve that almost no one here knows, and even fewer miss.

But this compliment, the first physical one Bucky’s given him since… since _then_ , goes to Steve’s head like helium. It’s a good thing it’s been Bucky’s turn behind the wheel for the past hour, because Steve would probably drive the car up into the sky right now.

(“It fits the story better if I’m the one driving,” Bucky explained when he scolded Steve out of the driver’s seat an hour ago. “I’m the Nazi soldier here. The Nazis would never let some Swiss civilian drive himself around here, no matter how many weapons he’s offering to sell.”)

Bucky slows the car as they approach the checkpoint. Bucky quickly squeezes Steve’s thigh before returning his hand to the wheel. The guards pour out of their little cabin and start asking questions. Bucky’s whole posture has changed, Steve notices. He’s straight-backed and conciliatory in a way Steve’s never seen him, fitting the role of a Nazi soldier low-ranking enough to be playing chauffeur to a Swiss arms dealer. He’s even more believable than he was as Mercutio in their otherwise laughable high school play. 

Steve can tell that Bucky’s introducing them. Then they start pointing at Steve, asking him questions. Steve’s completely lost, and secretly vows to learn German, because he _hates_ this.

“Name, rank and papers,” Bucky says in French, and that’s Steve’s cue.

When Steve hands over the documents Snellings gave him, and responds with his practiced answer, that he’s here to see what’s needed in terms of weapons, the guards start shooting questions at Bucky again.

“Schweizer,” he says, and then, with a little teasing in his voice, “Schweizer _Französisch_.”

The soldiers all laugh, stiffly, but it’s real enough. With a few stamps of papers. Bucky and Steve get waved through and sent up the winding road to the fortress, along with a couple of chaperones. Or, at least, that’s what Steve assumes they are when they climb into the backseat. But when Bucky starts chatting with them, easy-breezy, he starts to wonder if maybe they’re hitching a ride for fun. Steve can’t understand what they’re saying, but the soldiers act like two guys shooting the shit with a jolly new acquaintance. Bucky has them eating out of his hand.

The surrealism of the experience continues when they reach the castle and go through the whole shebang all over again. This time, Bucky talks to Steve more. He’s his guide, his translator, as they practiced. One of the officers (“Ugly fellow, name of Hoffersmeld, fancies himself something of an engineer, though of course he couldn’t stack two blocks on top of one another,” was Snellings’s description, and Steve agrees) gives them a tour of the castle. Bucky’s French translations are full of words and phrases that they practiced during the drive—accurate, but coded messages for Steve to take note of a map to the left, to use his fancy new photogenic memory to retain the blueprints, to pay a pretty compliment that keeps the ugly man pleased.

It all goes well enough, except for the fact that there’s nothing here. They get some intel that Morrow will probably be glad to hear, about a shortage of bullets in the southern part of the country, because the main road from the factory was blown up in friendly fire by incompetents. But this isn’t a Hydra base, not like Steve thought it would be, not like that original map promised.

Disappointed, he parrots off all the appropriate responses about the equipment he’s apparently come to sell, and waits until he can get out of there, and get back to Morrow, who’ll now know to lead a few hundred of his men through the woods instead of up the hill when he comes to take the base.

This is a worthy fight, but it isn’t the one Steve’s assigned himself.

It’s on their way out that Bucky raps his index and ring finger three times on the back of Steve’s coat, signaling something good. It means Bucky’s got something, to hold on a sec, so Steve does, even though he doesn’t know where to look. So, he looks over to his left, where he sees the faint outline of a door, too small for a grown man, and almost completely covered by a faded tapestry, but it’s definitely a door.

There’s no time to inspect, however, because Hoffersmeld’s already saying goodbye, and walking them back to their car. Steve doesn’t get to relay his finding to Bucky, because two more soldiers hop in to ride down the hill with them. The ride is more boisterous than Steve wants, full of rheumy laugher and snorts and lopsided smies.

Steve wishes Bucky weren’t so goddamn friendly, even if it is all pretend.

Soon they’re on the road again, but silent, as it takes them both a few minutes to come down from the adrenaline, and even longer for Bucky to slide out of his persona and back to the loose-limbed wiseass from Brooklyn. 

“It’s a good thing that isn’t a Hydra base anymore. There’s no way the Commandoes could take a place that size,” Bucky says. “It’s a fortress. Even Morrow’s got his work cut out for him.”

“I’m not so sure. Did you see the door?” When Bucky shakes his head no, Steve explains. “Maybe it leads down to a dungeon where it opens out and…”

“That doesn’t matter,” Bucky says at the end. “If there was ever anything down there, it’s all been emptied out. Reading between the lines, there was a small Hydra outpost here, but they packed up and left a few weeks ago, when the Allies started to get close.”

“Is that what were you tapping me about?” 

“No, it was something better. I overheard someone talking about ‘the nasty little doctor’, and how he and his equipment have been on the run for awhile.”

“Zola.”

“He’s on the move again. Headed through the Alps. I got the name of the town. I got everything. They barely knew who they were talking about. It was the low-level guys, intercepting a telegram. They didn’t know what it meant. I knew.”

Bucky’s still explaining, telling Steve every tiny detail, and extrapolating more, when he takes the turn for Brtnický Hrádek. 

“Are you sure we shouldn’t just keep going?” Steve asks. “I don’t care what Snellings said, and right now I’m not even sure I can care about Hochner. I’m not going to be able to sleep in the middle of enemy territory. We should get back and get this to Philipps asap.”

“It’s not about shut-eye. It’s about keeping our tail happy. When they see that we’re relaxed enough to get some dinner, get some rest, they’ll leave us alone for the rest of the trip back. This is insurance.”

Steve’s noticed the motorcycle following them, too. The fact that it’s a motorcycle supports Bucky’s plan; a lightweight thing like that isn’t meant to follow them for the long haul.

Bucky drives very slowly, looking in all directions. 

“What are we looking for?” Steve asks.

“Hochner always talked about this little inn near the edge of the village, with an apple orchard out back he used to steal from on his way to visit Mrs. Hochner’s parents. Said it had the prettiest view of the countryside, and the best homemade jam and borovička.”

“Jam and what?”

“A kind of booze. Strong stuff. He used to make me take a swig. Told me it would put hair on my balls, or something. He always sounded so happy when he mentioned this place. I always dreamed of seeing it for myself. Never thought I would. I’m even here with you. Luck works in a funny way, doesn’t it?”

Bucky sounds just about as happy as Hochner must have, sounds, for the first time since Steve found him on that table, like himself again. Steve’s heart is ready to burst from it. There have been so many moments today—the first time they’ve been properly, steadily alone—that have felt like… like before, when Bucky’s casual affection had overwhelmed Steve every day. Moments like these make Steve wonder if, maybe…

He points out of his side window. “There!”

Bucky’s grin when he follows Steve’s arm and sees the inn, just as described, is a sight to behold. 

“You ready to be Swiss again?”

Steve sits back. Who knew espionage could be _fun_? Imitating Snellings’s accent, he says, “Drive on, chauffeur.” 

“Jerk.”

Steve dons his ‘silent and handsome and Swiss’ persona again, and simply watches as Bucky plays his role with the pretty blond hostess sitting behind the inn’s little ground floor café bar. He manages to find just an edge of charm in his otherwise smugly serious officer routine. And now, yeah, now that he’s heard enough of both languages, and is listening to her responses, he feels stupid for never having noticed that Bucky had always switched between languages in the shop; they sound nothing alike. He’s picked up enough of the difference to hear how Bucky’s accent is different from the hostess’s, German-inflected, as it should be for the act, Steve guesses. 

Bucky’s friendly officer-driver charms the hostess into giving them two adjoining rooms. Rooms that turn out to be the best rooms, with lovingly carved wood furnishing and wide windows overlooking the little apple orchard in the back. Nothing’s changed from the fifty year-old memories Bucky’s been talking about. Steve wonders if it’ll still look like this fifty years from now.

“You’re really good at this,” Steve whispers when they’re both themselves again, out of those godforsaken outfits and down to just their shorts and undershirts. They’re in Steve’s room, slumped in a pair of faded silk-patterned chairs that Hochner would probably remember, too. “I mean it. I believed it, your whole shtick. The woman at the front desk practically swooned. Those guys at the castle all liked you. It even took me everything I had not to shoot you.”

So much relief and fondness suffuses Bucky’s his face, and it’s such a relief to Steve, too, to see it—to see _Bucky_ , not just after the contrast of his Nazi transformation, but in general, with him.

“You’ve always want to shoot me. You’ve been threatening it our whole lives,” Bucky says, but what he really means is ‘Thanks.’

Steve grins back. “I still might,” he replies, but what he really means is, ‘Any time.’

Now that he’s seen Bucky in action, a lot of their previous missions are starting to make more sense, in ways Steve never before guessed were lacking. “How many of the Commandoes missions have you scouted for?”

“Four or five.”

“Is that where you disappear off to sometimes? With Howard.” 

“Yeah. You gave him a taste for flying people into dangerous places and dropping them off. He asked Philipps for more jobs like that one, only sanctioned this time. He considers himself some sort of Red Baron or something, the kook. He’s been working on a prototype for fancy new parachutes that only sometimes work. I usually end up using a backup. I keep telling him to leave me alone and focus on that flying car of his, but you know Howard.”

Bucky’s tone is open and easy, the way it wasn’t whenever Bucky had brought up girls he’d taken out on dates after… the way it wasn’t in the morning, talking about Sargent Redman. 

“That’s all that’s going on? With you and Howard, I mean.”

Bucky’s flabbergasted reaction is all the answer Steve needs to feel a weight lift off his chest. “You thought Howard and me? Howard _Stark?_ ”

“The idea crossed my mind.” 

“I don’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted.”

“I have to say, I was judging your poor taste a lot harder than the whole spy thing.”

Bucky barks out a laugh. “I would, too.”

“That’s what I was pissed about, earlier. Not about anything else you’ve done.”

“Oh. Huh.” Bucky glances up at Steve, quizzical, and then focuses on his apple again.

They fall companionably silent for a minute, with the crispy, wet munch of Bucky’s bites into an apple from the basket on the dresser as the only sound. These apple must have some kind of special properties, or maybe Bucky’s really that hungry, because when he stands up again, a determined expression, with a touch of nervousness, solidifies over his features. He tosses the core into the waste bin at the far corner of the room, achieving a perfect dunk.

“Steve,” he says. “I want you to hit me.”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t let me tell you earlier, like a normal person, so we’re gonna do it your way, with punching. Hit me.”

“Why?” 

“Come on, with all you’ve got.” 

Steve doesn’t want to, has no interest in hurting Bucky, who knows better than most what ‘all he’s got’ entails. When Steve stays seated, Bucky eventually reaches over and hauls him to his feet, shoves him a lot harder than anyone else has been able to since the transformation, and gets Steve to start reflexively pushing back. 

Within a few minutes, they’re wrestling on the thick, heather-colored carpet, like they did when they were kids, laughing but not holding back, with Bucky’s strength evenly matched by Steve’s wily strategy…

That’s when it hits him: Bucky’s strength.

“Buck,” Steve pants from beneath him, pants into the woolly carpet, almost choking on a mouthful of fluff as Bucky presses against his back and holds him down like an anvil. “How…?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Steve. I’m not all right. There’s something wrong with me. They did something to me, back in that lab. Ever since Azzano. That’s why Howard’s always hanging around, why he’s sorta my handler, sometimes. Since Erskine died, he’s the only one left who knows anything about this stuff. He’s been studying me, not fucking me, you idiot. It’s supposed to be top secret, even more than what happened to you, because they don’t want Hydra to find out that it worked, or halfway so.”

“That what worked?”

Bucky demonstrates by pulling Steve’s hands over his head and holding them there even against Steve’s most valiant struggles. He can feel himself getting hot, hard, and it would be embarrassing if he wasn’t, for the first time, distracted by something more all-encompassing than his feelings for Bucky.

“You’re like me? That’s what they were doing on that table? They were making you like me?” Now that the sun has finally set, Steve notices the faint glow in Bucky’s eyes, the way he has every so often but has always written off as a trick of the light. A thousand little details from over the past few months now make sense, times when Bucky was a little stronger or faster, or seemed a little taller, the muscle he’s started to put on despite eating the same scanty rations as other guys who are all getting skinner.

“I’m a shittier version of you,” Bucky explains, “which, I’d say sounds just about right. You rescued me, thank god, before they finished whatever they were doing, so it’s not… It comes and goes. It isn’t the same. This morning I didn’t feel it, and it’ll probably be gone again tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t say it was because they made you.”

“I didn’t know what it was. It doesn’t feel great, Steve. It’s like a medicine that’s almost as bad as the sickness. I don’t like it, myself. There aren’t many who know, and the ones who do… people like Reichert were ordering me to do things with this that I… I didn’t want you to know because I didn’t want you to…”

And now Steve feels terrible for being this turned on right now, because Bucky’s so unhappy, and Steve’s _hard_ , unable to take his mind off the fact that Bucky’s the only one who could possibly understand, could take everything Steve has to give. Even if it’s only sometimes, it’s everything to Steve. Steve’s hard and Bucky’s so lost in the doldrums that he doesn’t even seem to notice. 

Well, maybe it isn’t so bad that Steve’s hard, because there’s one way to reassure Bucky, again, forever, that he’ll never think of him as anything less than perfect, that he’ll never not love him or think of him differently than he ever has, than he did before everything. Even if Bucky pushes him off, even if he really is over it, Steve reasons to himself, it’ll be enough of a gesture to convince Bucky that nothing that happens during this war will change Steve’s feelings about him. 

Steve suddenly flips them over, since surprise is the only way he can best Bucky right now, and kisses him. It takes Bucky a second to respond, but when he gets over the shock, he kisses back just as desperately. It isn’t long before he’s hard as well, but that isn’t what this is about. Steve focuses on the tart taste of the apple on Bucky’s breath, pushes against every muscle he comes into contact with—arms, legs, shoulders—and tests how eagerly Bucky presses back. Their cocks rub against one another through their shorts, but it’s Bucky sucking on Steve’s earlobe and saying “I missed this” that actually makes Steve come, humping Bucky’s leg and holding his breath. It’s only after he comes back to earth that he reaches up through the legs of Bucky’s shorts to grab his dick and stroke him the rest of the way. He feels Bucky’s come splash hot between his fingers and hears his name whispered over and over.

They keep kissing even as they come down from the high, and Steve holds on just as tight.

“You took the news better than I expected,” Bucky eventually says, and the affected seriousness of it makes Steve laugh even harder than expected, right into Bucky’s neck where he’s been kissing.

“You worry too much.”

“Not really. I’m breaking a lot of spy rules right now. Don’t get distracted, definitely don’t fuck on the job, not unless it’s the only way to get it done.”

A cramp of pure dread runs across Steve’s stomach. “You… You haven’t…”

“No, thank god. There hasn’t been anyone. Not since you.”

Steve blows out a lungful of air. “What about Redman?”

“We shared a foxhole in the early days. We were friends. He started to want more. I was lonely, and freezing, and we were getting shot at every few days, and I thought each shitty meal was gonna be my last. There was one minute—one stupid fucking minute—when I… Not even a whole minute, I don’t think, until I said ‘no thanks’. He hasn’t been able to let it go. He’s almost as stubborn about me as I am about you.”

All of this is ground-breaking news to Steve, who’s thought… Honestly, he sees now, he hasn’t been thinking at all, not to realize how much everything Bucky’s done for the past few months—including all the secret-keeping—has been screaming the truth about how he still feels.

“But you ended it,” Steve says stupidly. “I thought you didn’t want this.”

“You kept forgetting to close the goddamn curtains. You didn’t know how to play it the way two guys like us needed to play it. You were gonna get us caught. I didn’t want you getting into trouble, or arrested, or beat up, or worse. I knew was heading off to the war soon anyway. I didn’t want you waiting for someone you couldn’t really have, and who probably was never coming back. That story about Bobby Goines, the ‘missing in action’ letter his Ma got… All I could think of was that if it was me, missing but not confirmed dead, you’d waste your whole life hoping, or waiting around, or worse, coming over here to look for me, and never give up, never go on with your life, even though it was hopeless. It was better to just cut it off. It cut me up, worse than you could know, but if I had it to do all over again, I’d make the same choice.”

Steve can’t argue, because he knows Bucky’s right. It’s an apt description of how he was acting back then, and what he would have done. 

“But then I got here,” Bucky continues, “and you already had a girl. And I thought, well, good for him, I guess. It ate me up, though.”

“Peggy isn’t my girl.”

“You carry her goddamn picture in your compass. Every time you open the damn thing, I… But you seemed happy.”

“Guess I’m a better actor than you give me credit for, then.”

Bucky laughs so hard that he chokes on it. Steve sits back on his heels to let him work it out. 

“A regular Randolph Scott,” he finally wheezes, and then pulls a face. “And now I’ve got this image of Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott goin’ at it in Sherwood Forest.”

Now that Bucky’s put it out there, Steve sees the image, too. He’ll never _not_ see it now. “Don’t think even Howard’s money could get a film like that made.”

“Gotta say, if he abandoned the flying car for that project, I’d be all right with it.”

“She isn’t my girl,” Steve repeats, getting back to the original subject, because this is serious, because Bucky needs to _understand_. “She could be… could’ve been, I mean, I had thought… I didn’t think you still wanted me.”

“You’re an idiot. I wanted you even on that goddamn table. I wanted you even when I could barely remember my own name.”

Bucky kisses him again, and it’s awhile before Steve can think properly, but when he does, a few interesting ideas crystallize.

“I’m thinking…”

“Go on, I’ll give you time.” 

Steve thwacks Bucky on the side of his head and then reaches into his shorts to feel where Bucky’s gotten hard again. Slowly, leisurely, he strokes him, relishing it this time.

“Things are different now. I’m Captain America, Erskine’s petri dish godling.”

“Steve, don’t listen to that asshole. You’re not—”

“Wait. Hear me out. That’s what I am, to them. And you’re… you’re something just as interesting. A living specimen of Hydra’s experiments, and a damn good spy, to boot. That’s what they think of us. We shouldn’t flaunt it or anything, I’m not saying that. But if they do happen to find out, what are they going to do? Kick us out? Execute us? Lock us up? No. They’re going to look the other way. They need us.”

“I’m not fucking you with the curtains open, Steve,” Bucky says, but he’s nodding, getting it. “Harder,” he whispers, glancing down his chest, down to where Steve’s still methodically stroking him. 

“You got it up pretty fast again,” Steve says as he complies. “Faster than you used to. Is that…?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He already knows it’s the same for Steve. He asked weeks ago, embarrassingly, confusingly, one of the few times he’s failed to pull off a nonchalant attitude. He wriggles and shifts to get his mouth into Steve’s lap, all without breaking the contact of Steve’s hand on his dick. Pulling Steve’s hard cock out of his shorts, he slurps it into his mouth in one hot, wet, take.

“Jesus, Buck.” It takes only the feeling of Bucky coming in his hand again, adding to the slippery spunk that hasn’t yet dried from the first time, and then Steve’s following right behind, twitching his hips upwards into Bucky’s mouth, harder than he’d have let himself with anyone else. Steve pulls Bucky back up to meet his mouth, licking his own semen off Bucky’s lips, and from his chin.

“The faster we take down Hydra, the faster we can do this all the time,” he says when they break for air.

“I got an idea about that, by the way,” Bucky replies, just as soft and snuggly after sex as he ever was. 

“Hm?”

“With that much gear, the only way Zola can get around is by train. Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong, going after the bases. Maybe what we need to start doing is hitting them while they’re on the road, in transit. We know where Zola’s going next, we know the only route there is by train through the Alps. That’s where we hit him.”

Steve nods. It’s smart. It’s their best shot. “I think you’ve just started a pretty good mission briefing, Agent Barnes.”

“Thanks, Cap.”

* * *

By the time he turned his too-small Fiat into the driveway, Steve really did feel sick, keeling over from nostalgic pleasure-pain. 

The first thing he noticed was the apple orchard, looking exactly the same as he remembered. The whole building, the whole _town_ had remained frozen in time, unlike Brooklyn. 

Finally, he thought. Something like home. Something he could hold on to.

He hadn’t made a reservation, which he suddenly kicked himself for. As he parked, he tried to decide whether he wanted the same room again, whether he could stand it. Or if he should get a different one. Or if he should just order a swig of the borovička and scram.

As soon as he opened the door, the decision no longer mattered.

He knew it was stupid, crazy, to imagine expect the same little blond hostess sitting behind the inn’s ground floor café bar. He never in a million years would have expected to find Bucky in her place. 

“What?”

Bucky had been reading a newspaper and munching on an apple, but at Steve’s voice, he looked up and stared. “Steve?”

“What are you…” Steve took two more steps forward, froze, and then rushed at the counter. He should have gone around, he realized a millisecond later, but he’d already grabbed Bucky’s arms, and now that he’d gotten hold, he couldn’t bear to release him, not even to get closer.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I got a job,” he said simply. “They needed someone who spoke a few languages. And I… I liked it here.”

“You’ve been here this whole time?” It shouldn’t have been this easy to fall back into conversation, as though time and trauma and everything else hadn’t happened, but falling in with Bucky had always been easy. 

“Past few months, yeah. I was pretty disoriented for awhile. It was too hot back in the States. This place… This felt like home. I was going to come find you, soon. I promise. I wasn’t trying to be a secret, not again…”

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve said, and meant it. The tremor in his voice was more due to happiness mixed with self-recrimination; he should have guessed, and come here earlier, but damn was he glad he’d come today. “You’re okay?”

Bucky looked down. “Not really. Steve… I’ve done a lot of shit.”

“What’s new?”

Bucky huffed out a laugh, and all the tension evaporated as he lowered his shoulders. He lifted his hands, and Steve’s along with them, and gave Steve’s knuckles a kiss. “Need a room?”

“It's an inn isn't it? What else would I be here for?”

“I know just the one.”


End file.
